Thursday, October 8, 2015

Where Were You

Where were
you when JFK was assassinated? That’s the question we asked each other when I
was in college and needed a conversation starter. I was in fourth grade and,
although, I do remember watching his funeral on TV, I have little recollection
of how I heard the news.

Yesterday
there was a terror attack at a shopping mall in Petach Tikva. For those of you
not familiar with Israel’s geography, Petach Tikva (as with several of the
other terror spots yesterday) is in pre-67 Israeli borders. In other words, according
to those who think the whole Mideast problem is due to the settlements, Petach
Tikva has never been part of disputed territories.

At the time of
the attack one of my sons and his wife had gone to the movies. Not knowing what
time their movie started we sent out several concerned texts and WhatsApp messages
asking if they were okay. There was no answer. Learning that the only victim had
been, thankfully, lightly injured we assumed that my son and daughter-in-law
were inside the theater totally oblivious to what was going on.

That’s
exactly what happened. Leaving the theater later my son sent a puzzled note informing
us that he was fine. When I called to explain our concern he was totally surprised
and told me that he’d been at a mall in Ramat Gan, not Petach Tikva, as we all
thought.

That
prompted dozens of WhatsApp to flow back and forth with my children asking each
other were they’d been when The Twin Towers fell. My daughter wrote that she’d
been at a course and in her naiveté thought everyone was talking about a disaster
movie. I certainly understood how she felt and had found it near impossible to
wrap my head around the event. Someone invited me to view the tragedy on his
cable TV news. I declined without a second thought. Maybe if I’d gone I would
have understood the proportion of the loss better.

courtesy of historyundo...

One of my
sons came home that day with an inscrutable look on his face. His brother
returned singing, It’s the End of the World as We Know It. At that time
I was certain that America would have more understanding of the terror we’d
been living with for more than a year. I was wrong. Instead of empathy we were
still being instructed to act with restraint. Now, fourteen years later, that hasn’t
changed.

So I must
ask some questions. Where are you when the terror is going on in Israel? Are
you as oblivious as my son in the movie theater was? Or are you plugged into Israeli
news? Are you challenging false
headlines like those appearing twice in BBC this week emphasizing the death of
the terrorists instead of their attacks on innocent victims? Are you praying for an end for the terror? Are
defending the only Jewish country when you speak to your friends and colleagues?

In the Torah
portion that we will read this Shabbat, it states that In the beginningG-d
created the heavens and the earth. Rashi, the classic Torah commentator, writes[ES1] that the Torah begins here so we
will know that it was Hashem who made the world and it was His right to divide
it up as he saw fit. He gave the Land of Israel to the Jewish people.

We, the
Jewish people, need to believe this with all out heart and all our might. If we
believe then the rest of the world will. We need to do all we can to stop the
terror. We need to behave in such a way that fourteen years from now when
someone asks us what we were doing during the terror war against Israel we won’t
have to hang our heads in shame.

Aim of Blog

Emunah, faith in God, does not mean believing only good things will happen; it means believing that whatever God does is for the best. I wrote these words at a time when drive-by shootings and suicide bombers had become almost weekly, if not daily, tragedies. Now, more than ten years later, the words are no less true. Whatever HaShem does is for the best. It is my hope to post articles, advice, and homey stories everyweekwhich will reinforce this fact. And now, a special thanks to:

Batya Medad, my neighbor and experienced blogger. Without her I would never have been able to set up

About Me

Born in Wichita, Kansas, I became a Baalat Teshuva, newly religious, in Phoenix, Arizona while attending ASU. After twelve years of marriage my husband and I made Aliyah with five children and settled in Shilo in the heart of Israel. Two more children joined the family as have daughters-in-law, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, Baruch HaShem. My favorite past times are learning, sewing, hiking, reading, cooking, baking, enjoying my family and friends, and, of course, writing. My first novel, Sondra’s Search, was published in 2007 and I am working on the sequel.